Caughey D, Berinsky AJ, Chatfield S, Hartman E, Schickler E, Sekhon JS.
Target Estimation and Adjustment Weighting for Survey Nonresponse and Sampling Bias. Cambridge University Press; 2020.
Publisher's VersionAbstractWe elaborate a general workflow of weighting-based survey inference, decomposing it into two main tasks. The first is the estimation of population targets from one or more sources of auxiliary information. The second is the construction of weights that calibrate the survey sample to the population targets. We emphasize that these tasks are predicated on models of the measurement, sampling, and nonresponse process whose assumptions cannot be fully tested. After describing this workflow in abstract terms, we then describe in detail how it can be applied to the analysis of historical and contemporary opinion polls. We also discuss extensions of the basic workflow, particularly inference for causal quantities and multilevel regression and poststratification.
Frymer P, Grumbach J.
Labor Unions and White Racial Politics. American Journal of Political Science. 2020.
AbstractScholars and political observers point to declining labor unions, on the one hand, and rising white identity politics, on the other, as profound changes in American politics. However, there has been little attention given to the potential feedback between these forces. In this article, we investigate the role of union membership in shaping white racial attitudes. We draw upon research in history and American political development to generate a theory of interracial labor politics, in which union membership reduces racial resentment. Cross‐sectional analyses consistently show that white union members have lower racial resentment and greater support for policies that benefit African Americans. More importantly, our panel analysis suggests that gaining union membership between 2010 and 2016 reduced racial resentment among white workers. The findings highlight the important role of labor unions in mass politics and, more broadly, the importance of organizational membership for political attitudes and behavior.
Costa M.
Ideology, Not Affect: What Americans Want from Political Representation. American Journal of Political Science. 2020.
Abstract
How do citizens want to be represented by elected officials in an era of affective polarization? Contemporary narratives about American politics argue that people embrace elite expressions of negative partisanship, above and beyond representation on policy. Using three conjoint experiments, I examine how individuals weigh the relative value of substantive representation on issues, constituency service, and partisan affect. The findings challenge the notion that Americans are primarily motivated by their affective, partisan identities and demonstrate the value of policy congruence and service responsiveness in terms of perceptions of political representation. The implication is that people evaluate elected officials in ways that we would expect them to in a healthy, functioning representative democracy, rather than one characterized by partisan animus. Even if polarization is driven by “affect, not ideology,” citizens prioritize representational styles centered around the issues that matter to them.
Zhang C, Taylor SJ, Cobb C, Sekhon J.
Active Matrix Factorization for Surveys. Annals of Applied Statistics. 2020;14 (3) :1182-1206.
AbstractAmid historically low response rates, survey researchers seek ways to reduce respondent burden while measuring desired concepts with precision. We propose to ask fewer questions of respondents and impute missing responses via probabilistic matrix factorization. A variance-minimizing active learning criterion chooses the most informative questions per respondent. In simulations of our matrix sampling procedure on real-world surveys as well as a Facebook survey experiment, we find active question selection achieves efficiency gains over baselines. The reduction in imputation error is heterogeneous across questions and depends on the latent concepts they capture. Modeling responses with the ordered logit likelihood improves imputations and yields an adaptive question order. We find for the Facebook survey that potential biases from order effects are likely to be small. With our method, survey researchers obtain principled suggestions of questions to retain and, if desired, can automate the design of shorter instruments.
Bazzi S, Fiszbein M, Gebresilasse M.
Frontier Culture: The Roots and Persistence of“Rugged Individualism” in the United States. Econometrica. 2020.
Publisher's VersionAbstractThe presence of a westward-moving frontier of settlement shaped early U.S. history. In 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the American frontier fostered individualism. We investigate the “frontier thesis” and identify its long-run implications for culture and politics. We track the frontier throughout the 1790–1890 period and construct a novel, county-level measure of total frontier experience (TFE). Historically, frontier locations had distinctive demographics and greater individualism. Long after the closing of the frontier, counties with greater TFE exhibit more pervasive individualism and opposition to redistribution. This pattern cuts across known divides in the United States, including urban–rural and north–south. We provide evidence on the roots of frontier culture, identifying both selective migration and a causal effect of frontier exposure on individualism. Overall, our findings shed new light on the frontier's persistent legacy of rugged individualism.
Carnes N, Lupu N.
The White Working Class and the 2016 Election. Perspectives on Politics. 2020.
AbstractAcademics and political pundits alike attribute rising support for right-wing political options across advanced democracies to the working classes. In the United States, authors claim that the white working class offered unprecedented and crucial support for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. But what is the evidence for this claim? We examine all of the available academic survey data gathered around the election, along with a number of surveys from prior elections. We test four common claims about the white working class in 2016: (1) that most Trump voters were white working-class Americans; (2) that most white working-class voters supported Trump; (3) that unusually large numbers of white working-class voters switched from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016; and (4) that white working-class voters were pivotal to Trump’s victory in several swing states. We find that three of the four are not supported by the available data, and the other lacks crucial context that casts doubt on the idea that Trump uniquely appealed to working-class Americans. White working-class Americans have been supporting Republican presidential candidates at higher rates in recent elections, but that process long predates 2016, and narratives that center on Trump’s alleged appeal obscure this important long-term trend.
Banda KK, Carsey TM, Curiel J.
Incumbency status and candidate responsiveness to voters in two-stage elections beginning with a primary. Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties . 2020.
AbstractTheories of representation suggest that candidates should respond ideologically to their constituency. Two-stage elections like those in the U.S. force candidates to decide which parts of their constituency they should respond to: citizens who are active enough to participate in primaries or those who only participate in general elections. We posit that non-incumbent candidates should mostly focus on the preferences of primary voters while incumbents should be largely unmoved by the preferences of either set of voters. We test these expectations using data from U.S. House and Senate contests and find support for our theory. Our results suggest that scholars should pay closer attention to the two-stage nature of U.S. elections when evaluating electoral responsiveness.